Steve Jobs said, “This is really hot,” when he unveiled the iPhone 4 at his Worldwide Developers Conference last month. He wasn’t joking.

It took Apple 72 days to sell a million of their original iPhone when it launched in 2007. Last year, the iPhone 3GS sold a million units in three days, a benchmark it took the iPad took 28 days to achieve. But all these look positively lethargic compared to the iPhone 4 and Apple’s most successful launch in its history: they’ve sold over 1.7 million phones in just three days since its release on June 24.

Estimates for Q3 claim sales of 10.2 million units, rising to 12.2 million for Q4.

The really interesting thing is that 77% of those early sales were to existing iPhone owners. Over three-quarters of sales are to folks who are upgrading! That’s the very definition of a want, not a need.

As Seth Godin might say, seek out committed customers and harvest a tribe by finding/making products for them. Inspire and reship.

Steve Jobs is the ultimate tribe leader. Love him or loath him, make no mistake you’re watching the Pied Piper of tech, folks.

Image from Wired magazine.

Old news: technology and consumerism are intertwined. Simple example, the cheque book and then the debit card were tech replacements for cash.

Today’s smart phones and the rush of tablets we’re about to see really are changing the landscape now, not just tomorrow. Watch Scoble interview the head of eBay mobile, Steve Yankovich to see how serious one of the globe’s largest retailers is about mobile.

They’re serious about augmented reality; serious about decoupling from the desktop PC; and serious about going truely global. It’s 25 minutes long but hang in there, the second half is more ‘business’ than the first.

Smith-Harmon has released a study of American retail email trends for last year. Unsurprisingly, 2009 saw record volumes distributed.

It states that the 100 largest retailers sent an average of 132 promotional emails to each of their subscribers. That’s an average of 11 emails a month and 2.5 per week, per subscriber (peaking at 15.4 in December). Overall, top online retailers sent 12% more promotional emails in 2009 than they did the year before—and 39% more than during 2007.

You’ve got to wonder if we’re going to kill the golden goose here. The overwhelming number of emails threatens to neuter your subscribers’ inbox. I’d argue consumers are becoming numb to special offers and super savings.

This is about perfecting frequency, not necessarily content. It’s a nexus that lies between maximum engagement (revenue in most cases) and maximum disengagement (unsubscribers). Think about consumers’ distain for physical junk mail promotional mail shots. It’s not too much of a leap to imagine that feeling about your inbox -  even if you did volunteer your address.

If a salesman turns up for a meeting in new Porsche 911, he’d better be flogging footy players, not underwear or umbrellas to BHS.

Most salespeople understand the principles of the game: set a tone that’s both professional and in line with your brand and product offering.

That’s why I’m amazed at business people who rock up to meetings in £40k cars and then produce cheap, battered, old laptops from leather briefcases.

If you’re selling top-end tyres, tiaras, towels, till systems or toothpicks, surely it’s unwise to do so with dated equipment?

Salesmen want you to procure something with an intangible benefit associated with brand equity (think perfume for the classic example where a tiny fraction of the cost goes to production). My problem is they often do so while displaying a lack of desire themselves. Yes it’s shallow. And yes, playing the game is a branding exercise.

It’s the equivalent of a builder turning up at your house in a beat up old transit, while he tells you how much quality and added value he brings with his £30k conservatories.

Cheap is perfectly understandable – frugal is fine – but when you’re selling luxury, quality or style, know that you should display some yourself as well (let’s call it ‘acting out’).

Easy win: an £800 MacBook comes over way better than a four year-old Dell some folks would schlep around. (And, no, don’t kid yourself, it’s not JUST about the label.)

Following their best Christmas to date, the very on-form John Lewis was recently voted Britain’s best shop by Verdict and its 6,000 shoppers. Let’s be honest, what’s not to like? The stores are upmarket but unpretentious. They’ve a quality product offering and peerless customer service.

John Lewis is different from normal retailers. They’re known as a bell-wether for high street trading, not because they mimic other retailers but because they report sales figures weekly as opposed to the normal quarterly results from the likes of Tesco and M&S. They are incredibly transparent; a throwback to being a ‘partnership’, owned by its 69,000 employees partners. This transparency and an old fashioned willingness to ‘serve’ clearly run through this business.

Although, that said, the latest ForeSee Christmas E-Retail Satisfaction Index tells a slightly different story of their online offering. In this brief but excellent study of the top 40 retailers (according to traffic), Amazon trump John Lewis as clear overall winners.

JL did come out on top when looking at the multichannel category, ahead of Boots and HMV. Most surprisingly of the pure plays (Internet only retailers) ASOS rank seventh, behind QVC and M&M Direct.

Regardless, both polls show JL is getting it very right where its customers are concerned. If I were Andrea O’Donnell, JL’s Commercial Director, I’d be very pleased but a little puzzled as to how a cold pure play like Amazon could best me when customers can’t even speak to an individual, let alone be impressed by one. Email updates obviously go a long way.

It’s pretty much a given that SMEs are more likely to be passionate about what they do than lumbering corporates answering to the City. Let’s be honest, most SMEs don’t tend to start a gardening business if they can’t stand the sight of grass.

Unfortunately, that passion can overrun into myopia where those in business only play to themselves – the People Like Us syndrome.

I’m sure you hear it in your office all the time: I’d never buy it for my home (so I assume my customers wouldn’t either)… my wife wouldn’t like it (so let’s leave it out of the catalogue)…. I’m not sure we’ve the market for that here (because they wouldn’t pay for it themselves).

It’s said that ‘me’ and ‘I’ are some of the worst words to use in a sales pitch because the customer doesn’t care about you or your likes and dislikes relating to that car, that printer or that fridge freezer. They’re not buying for a complete stranger (i.e. the salesperson); they’re buying for themselves to satisfy selfish reasons.

People Like Us is the other side of the same coin to be avoided in business.

Charging for postage is the perennial debate of e-commerce. I think Amazon’s decision this week to extend its free postage charge trialled before Christmas might favour a good deal more consumers than Amazon serves. I can see other retailers having to follow suit as they look to win a friend and gain a client from their competitors.

You can almost see it as a cost per acquisition – how much would you pay a 3^rd party to get you a customer? Is it cheaper than banner ads and affiliate percentages?

Then again, when Amazon can charge $3 billion for a Discovery Channel CD-ROM, maybe taking the hit on their postage bills wont hurt the P&L so much.

Photo credit: Mooganic

I used to work for someone who claimed proudly that he knew almost nothing about our product and he certainly wouldn’t use our products. He would even speak derogatorily of those who did. With pride he’d say, “I’m a businessman, I don’t need to know about a product to sell it.”

Of course there’s quite a parcel of truth in his arrogance: your estate agent didn’t live in your house before you bought it and Dr John Davis doesn’t really know what childbirth is like. But we all want our salespeople to be empathetic, don’t we? We demand advice and expertise and the only real way of gaining that is through experience.

Just how our teams communicate that to customers is as much a marketing issue as website copy or advertising budgets. And it might be worth reminding them that ‘do what I say, not what I do’ is even more unpalatable now than it was as a child. Would you take health advice from an obese, alcoholic, chain-smoker?

Yet another naval-gazing award ceremony took place last week where BSkyB were claimed Britain’s Most Admired Company from Management Today.

Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.

Every week or so Sky point me to sport I don’t watch and movies I have no interest in. Considering they have the digital knowledge of everything my household has watched for a couple of years, they display zero wherewithal in their emails.

A few ideas for Sky’s marketing team to increase email PR (personal and relevancy):
Croudsourcing – people who liked X and Y (stuff my house has seen) also watch Z on Wednesday at 10pm
Follow on – if you liked The Apprentice you’ll love our top three business programs (some you may need to pay for)
Bundles – we’ve prepared three bundles of viewing which we think you’ll like. Please pick and amend them. These can be uploaded to my box and amending them lets Sky’s brain know and next week’s bundles will be even more relevant.
DVD iLike – Sky should ask me about my DVD collection to better profile my tastes. You could even take into account my book collection as well (I always think Amazon miss a trick here by only tracking purchases).

I am infinitely more likely to engage with, and probably upgrade, because of the relevancy of the above. So why do they torture my inbox with High School Musical and the Ashes?

Thorough email PR like this is way beyond the data mining systems at SMEs but surely Britain’s Most Admired could up the ante?

I was asked this week, ‘What does a manager really do?’ It was a fairly innocuous, rhetorical, jovial question from a well-paid, senior person.

The graduate switch flicked and I immediately thought, ‘seeing that the company’s goals are met’. After all, it’s the leader’s job to define and create those goals and aims, and it’s management’s job to realise them. Right?

But managing people is rarely a squeaky clean affair. I’m not a huge supporter of lofty job titles as they can often cause internal problems, but anyone claiming to be a ‘Manager’ will find themselves wearing several hats (in no particular order):

• go between
• consultant (to those above and below)
• amateur psychologist
• negotiator
• dispute resolver
• idea instigator
• organiser
• governor
• role model
• decision maker (the buck stops and all that)
• communications expert (surely THE key to management)
• soldier (ever metaphorically fallen on your sword?)
• captain
• big brother/sister (you need to eat more, drink less, curb spending)
• counsellor
• teacher
• steward
• servant
• policy pursuer
• change agent
• supporter (of others, of the different viewpoint – perhaps the weaker voice)
• challenger (of the status quo)

It strikes me that a manager who only wants to manage isn’t anywhere near up to the job. The seven-letter title is low-balling the variety of commitment needed in all but the safest of environments.